David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

A seawolf was following close astern. It was a big brute, twice the length of a tall man. It swam with lazy sweeps of its tail, back and forth.

Chalcus chatted in the stern with Lusius as one man to another. As one pirate to another, very possibly, so Ilna had made her way to the far bow where her presence wouldn't constrain the discussions. Like her, Chalcus was gathering information which would fit into a pattern-eventually.

Besides, standing in the bow meant she breathed the sea air instead of theDefender 's stench.

The fishing fleet was in sight, many handfuls of boats whose crews were a few men apiece. Though they were no more than half the size of theBird of the Tide, they had small central cabins; a skiff was tied to the stern of each one. The crews groped over the sides with long poles.

The Sea Guards rowed theDefender, cursing, sweating, and fouling one another, but moving the vessel forward nonetheless. Most people weren't very good at their jobs; Ilna wasn't surprised to find that was true of oarsmen as surely as it was plowmen or weavers. It was neither accident nor charity that caused other women to bring the yarn they'd spun to Ilna, who did the weaving for all Barca's Hamlet. For the most part people arranged things so that a lot of them did the same thing. That way it got done well enough that everybody survived; more or less, and for a time.

A crack crew of men chosen and trained by Chalcus could do much better than these Sea Guards managed, but they were goodenough. There was only one Chalcus; and one Ilna, for that matter.

And one Prince Garric, Ilna was quite sure. They each had their place in the pattern Someone was weaving.

"The shallows are just ahead!" cried the lookout clinging to the masthead. Neither the spar nor the sail were aboard, but theDefender 's mast was stepped to provide a vantage point. Lusius hadn't bothered to fit a platform, though. The sailor shinnied up unaided and clung to the stay rope with his legs wrapped around the pole. "We're entering the shallows!"

Chalcus and the Commander walked forward, Lusius in the lead because there wasn't room enough for two to walk abreast on the catwalk between the oarbenches. He carried a light buckler in his left hand.

"The Commander says that the bottom rose into these shallows when the Rua appeared for the first time," Chalcus called cheerfully, indicating the water with a wave fo his hand. "I've seen such a shade only once, in a lagoon far to the south."

The railing didn't extend to the far bow; Ilna touched a forestay and leaned over. Though clear, the sea had a violet cast and seemed to be no deeper than the height of a tall man. Pinkish sea lilies waved their jointed tentacles; holes for the breathing tubes of clams pocked the sand covering most of the bottom. She saw no fish.

"It doesn't look like the water I saw on the way north from Donelle," Ilna said, speaking for the sake of politeness rather than because she thought she had any useful knowledge to add. "I've never seen plants like these either."

"Plants?" repeated Lusius. "Not a one of them, mistress! All these are animals, whatever they look like."

Rincip, the one-eyed man who commanded the Sea Guards and acted as Lusius' chief lieutenant, snarled an order from the stern. Ilna couldn't understand the words, but the crew seemed to. The rowers of the upper bank brought their oars aboard and began arming themselves with weapons stored under the walkway. Most of them strung bows, short but stiff-looking.

"I've got Guards aboard the fishing boats too," Lusius said, "but they're not much use-as you'll see, I shouldn't wonder. Sometimes they'll keep the Rua away till theDefender can come up, but mostly they're just there to make sure the men are really bringing up the shell. The bloody cowards are afraid that if they make a good haul, they'll be attacked!"

TheDefender continued toward the fishing boats, driven by the lower bank of oarsmen. Though they were obviously trying to keep together, the boats had drifted some ways apart. A man couldn't shout from one side of the straggle and be understood on the other.

"What happens if the Rua attack before theDefender joins the fishing fleet?" Chalcus asked, his voice a little flatter than usual. He and Ilna had expected to go out at first light when the fishing fleet did, but the warship wasn't ready till midmorning. If Chalcus hadn't been careful, his tone would've held a sneer for the indiscipline of the Commander's force.

"Oh, they never do that," Lusius said, scanning the heavens. "They've no reason to attack till the boats have a good load of shell, so we sleep in ourselves."

The sea had become even shallower than when Chalcus called Ilna's attention to it, and the bottom now was coral. She still didn't see fish, but there were any number of odd-looking creatures both crawling and attached to the rock. Among them were the little belemites, walking on clumps of tentacles and dragging their brilliant shells behind.

The reason that patrol vessels wobbled so unpleasantly was that they drew very little water, but even so Ilna wondered if theDefender would grind a hole in her hull on the coral. As shallow as this was she could probably stand on the bottom and breathe even though she couldn't swim, but it would be a very long walk to dry land.

"I'd thought your Red Wizard might be with us today," Chalcus said, blocking the sun with his left hand as he surveyed the upper sky. "Struggling with the wizard-demons as he assures us he does."

The Commander looked at him sharply, thought there'd been nothing of open mockery in Chalcus' tone. "Gaur has his sanctum in the castle," he said, still frowning slightly. "He works there. Never fear, he's doing whatever he can."

"When do the-" Ilna said, but she swallowed the remainder of the sentence, "-Rua arrive." She suddenly understood what the dots Chalcus was watching really were. "I see," she corrected herself. "The Rua have been here all along."

"Aye, the devils!" Lusius said with real venom in his voice. "They pick their time, too. They must have eyes like hawks!"

TheDefender passed within a stone's throw of a fishing boat, close enough that Ilna got a good look at what they were doing. Two men used small nets on the end of poles to scoop belemites out of the coral. The little shellfish didn't move fast enough to evade the nets, but they were still hard to winkle out from between the coral and hard-shelled anemones. When a fisherman succeeded, he whisked the belemite aboard and dropped it into a large wickerwork basket in front of the deckhouse.

The third man in the boat was a Sea Guard with a strung bow and three arrows stuck through his sash. He watched with a morose expression as theDefender sloshed past.

Now that Ilna had recognized the dots in the high heaven as winged men circling, it was she who noticed when their motion shifted. "Something's changed!" she said. "The Rua are diving, or…"

The Rua dipped, then rose instead of plunging down on the fishing fleet. They'd modified their ceaseless circling, but that didn't mean they were attacking.

"They're dropping something!" Chalcus cried. "They've each one let something go as they dived!"

Rincip shouted angry orders; the flutist blowing time for the rowers in the stern swung into a faster tempo. Both helmsmen leaned into their tillers; with only one bank of oars manned, theDefender didn't accelerate quickly enough to heel the outside-starboard-steering oar out of the water even in a sharp turn.

"They drop chunks of volcanic glass," Lusius explained grimly. "Big chunks, some as long as your forearm, and the edges sharper'n knifeblades. From that height, they can stave in the decking when they hit."

"But can they hit?" Ilna said, frowning. "Surely the Rua can't really aim from that far up?"